Statistics

SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF)'s International Institute for Species Exploration (IISE) compile an annual list of the top ten of the approximately 18,000 new species named during the previous year.

"In the past half-century we have come to recognize that species are going extinct at an alarming rate. It is time that we accelerate species exploration, too. Knowledge of what species exist, where they live, and what they do will help mitigate the biodiversity crisis and archive evidence of the life on our planet that does disappear in the wild," said Dr. Quentin Wheeler, ESF president and founding director of the IISE.

This is not the normal territory of Brain Damage, we know, but one of the top ten this year has come as a pleasant surprise. A damselfly from Gabon, Africa, is one of the year's new discoveries, one of sixty new species of damselfly reported this year. This particular one is very colourful and distinct.

ESF note that: "given that the genus name is Umma, it was quick work to give this lovely and delicate damselfly a name that might be familiar to rock-and-roll fans: the band Pink Floyd named its 1969 double album Ummagumma (which has yet another meaning as a British slang term for sex)."